On board the R/V Knorr, the ship he used during his discovery of the RMS Titanic in 1985, Ballard and a team of scientists, students, teachers, engineers, and technical staff focused on a 1,500-year-old merchant ship submerged 1,000 feet beneath the surface of the Black Sea's oxygen-free waters.

In a breakthrough advance in remote exploration, a technology platform developed by EDS enabled real-time satellite transmission of audio, video and data from the underwater excavation site to the Innerspace Center, a NASA-style mission control facility within Ballard's Institute for Archaeological Oceanography at the University of Rhode Island.

In essence, the new technology will allow researchers to explore the ocean's depths without going to sea, and for a fraction of the time and expense typically incurred by such expeditions. One key to establishing this telepresence successfully was ViewCast's Niagara streaming video encoders and servers.

During the 2003 Black Sea expedition, high definition video from underwater cameras on mobile and static mounts captured the delicate excavation tasks performed by Hercules, a first-of-a-kind deep-sea exploration vehicle built by Mystic Aquarium and Institute for Exploration (IFE). Because there are no organisms in the water to contribute to decay or deterioration, the ancient merchant ship embedded in the sea floor and its contents have been very well preserved. Controlled by scientists and archaeologists aboard the Knorr or at URI, Hercules used its articulated arm, water jets, vacuum, and sophisticated force-feedback manipulator to uncover objects such as amphorae and stow them for safe transport to the surface.

Topside within the portable satellite uplink and encoding van, a 20-foot shipping
container converted specifically for the mission, on-ship and underwater video were
fed through ViewCast Niagara encoders to provide four Windows video streams, in
addition to two MPEG-2 streams, for transport from ship to shore.

"One of the things that's very important when using equipment for these expeditions is that it be extremely reliable," says Mike Magers, EDS project manager for the Black Sea mission. "When you are in the middle of the Black Sea at an excavation site, you cannot replace equipment. You have to be confident in the product's reputation for reliability."

"We selected the Niagara because of the Osprey capture card and because it is optimized in design and build-out to encode video. True to form, it performed flawlessly right from the beginning and through the whole five weeks. It's as bulletproof as anything I've worked with. I have had other boxes from other companies, and they couldn't do what Niagara did. It just cruised right through and didn't even breathe hard."

The Niagara is built on ViewCast's award-winning Osprey streaming video capture and codec boards and provides a powerful, reliable, and cost-effective plug-and-play solution for virtually any streaming, archiving, or video production application. The addition of Niagara SCX software enables full-featured remote workflow automation and control, an option Magers was happy to have, though he never had to use it.

From the Knorr, voice, video and data were relayed from a specially stabilized antenna, designed to compensate for the rolling motion of the ship, via satellite to an MCI earth station in Andover, Maine. Reaching Andover in less than one second, these signals then were routed via DS3 land line to EDS in Plano, Texas, for monitoring, and then just across the street to Southern Methodist University (SMU).

Linked to the Internet2 next-generation, high-bandwidth network, which connects more than 200 universities and governmental bodies, SMU provided high-speed distribution to the Mystic and URI campuses, where students and researchers followed the expedition in real-time. As part of Ballard.s initiative to bring science to children, broadcasts were also delivered from Mystic to JASON (Ballard's Massachusetts-based educational venture) and Boys and Girls Club sites across the country.

Participants in the real-time exchange saw staff working on Hercules on-deck, watched a stream from the presence camera in control van, and carried on conversations with Ballard during a multitude of daily Q&A sessions. Two to three video feeds were being picked up at any given time from 12 cameras on board and below the Black Sea surface, and technicians selected the feeds they wanted and determined the format in which to relay them to shore.

"Dr. Ballard would like the Innerspace Center to do for underwater remote exploration what NASA has done for outerspace exploration," says Magers. "That's why the remote console and operation from URI 6,000 miles away from the Black Sea is so vital. In the future, he wants to mount the same technology on other ships. Then, any scientist with Internet2 connectivity could access any of those ships on any day and do scientific work that currently would take years and substantial funding."

Scientists could do meaningful research for little to no investment, ongoing, from anywhere. This expedition has really created interest in the incredible variety of possibilities provided by remote exploration.

According to Magers, Ballard has vowed he'll never again conduct deep-sea exploration without this technology. The 2003 Black Sea mission has served as proof of concept for new expeditions and applications.

Just as the dove brought Noah a promising message about his future, Ballard and his Osprey deliver insights into the past for scientists and students everywhere. The technological advancements that make it possible might be considered a small miracle themselves.

Using your ViewCast Products in an Editing Environment How Osprey and Niagara Systems Leverage Editing Capabilities of Popular Editing Packages

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